I'm sitting here looking at the email stats for the flower and gift sector during the month of February. The first thing that captured my attention was the spike in Web traffic. Of course you expect a spike at Valentine's Day, but what is interesting is that the spike in Web traffic is not on the 13th, friends. Or the days leading up to the 14th. No -- the majority of you are actually going to sites like Proflowers the day of Valentine's Day (one guesses -- the MALE majority of you) in a desperate attempt to get those flowers …

There is an important lesson for email marketers to learn from television. In the olden days, we had three networks from which to choose. Then came cable and satellite dishes and suddenly there were zillions of shows, yet the familiar refrain: "A thousand channels and nothing is on." The big networks struggled to draw an audience and remain relevant. The tried and true formulas just weren't working. Then something interesting happened. People started talking about TV shows again. They began devoting nights to their favorite programs, paying for premium networks, buying past seasons of series on DVDs, extending the viewing …

Long copy has been the stock-in-trade of advertising writers since Gutenberg first made type move. Yet email marketing tends to be focused on the top 300 pixels, giving little play to a longer message. We all know why -- attention spans today are so short, we feel we have to hit the consumer with a short, sharp shock in order to be noticed, never mind read. That being said, there are still times when longer emails can outperform short ones, especially when you want to secure the understanding, engagement and loyalty of customers with your emails

Incentivizing subscribers with discounts and free shipping to spur sales is core to ecommerce newsletters. What's less common is using incentives to drive other email and online behaviors. Here are some of the behaviors -- from the most common to the more exotic -- that the largest online retailers have been trying to encourage with discounts, sweepstakes and other carrots.

John Engler of Unsubcentral had some great comments based on my article last week and the problems I was having unsubscribing from a newsletter. I'm providing them verbatim with his permission....

Dear Email Diva: I just received an email from my credit card company, encouraging me to pay my bill online. I'm sure this cuts down on costs, paper waste, etc. The reason I have an issue with this particular email is that since I opened this credit card almost 2 years ago, I have never once NOT paid online. I would think that companies would do a little more homework to refine their email lists to ensure that the emails are targeted at the right people. I feel that by sending me useless emails like this, the credit card company …

The perfect email is one that is relevant to the consumer. Right? It's timely, in context, well-rendered and provides some sort of value. We don't often think of mass mailings as the perfect email. Even with dynamic content and segmentation, this relevance is hard to achieve.